The Great EBook Experiment ~ By Laurie Steed [05.10.2009]
On February 29th, 2008, Neil Gaiman released the full version of his novel American Gods online, to be read free of charge for thirty days. The results were as follows:
-85,000 unique users visited the site during the promotion, reading a total of 3.8 million pages of the book (an average of 46 per person).
-The weekly average sales of the print version of American Gods went up 300% during the promotion.
-Sales of all Neil Gaiman titles went up 40% at independent booksellers during the promotion (Independent bookseller results were the only ones able to be accurately inferred, as a parallel Gaiman promotion at various chains fuzzed the available data.)
Even considering the already esteemed status of Gaiman, these results are eye opening, challenging preconceived notions of free eBooks cannibalising sales of already existing print editions.
Neil Gaiman is not the only high-profile author to have recently experimented with digital content as a promotional tool. Wired editor and author of The Long Tail Chris Anderson featured his new book Free as a time-limited eBook through Kindle, Scribd and Google Books in July 2009, and Seth Godin’s Tribes appeared on audible.com as a free audio book towards the end of 2008.
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has long championed free eBooks, offering free electronic versions of all his works under a Creative Commons license, effectively allowing unlimited duplication or ‘remixing’ of the original text for noncommercial use. Doctorow has long claimed that giving away free eBooks results in more print copies of said books being sold.
Watch This Space?
Whether Australia has the readership to support Doctorow’s hypothesis is unclear; to obtain the necessary sales, such an experiment would more than likely need the assistance of both a media outlet and any number of aggregators (blogs, Twitter accounts, etc) to spread the word. Here is an example of how such a project could work locally:
The Age Book of the year promotion: A tie-in eBook promotion with Sleepers Publishing. In the lead-up to Christmas (Late October/early November), Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming is released free to to read online (in a format similar to Scribd or Google Books) for a limited time from either the Sleepers website, or Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming website. The link is then publicised in the A2 section of Saturday’s Age and on The Book Show on Radio National, posted via literary blogs such as Spike, SPLOG and Literary Minded, and tweeted via the SPUNC, Austliterature, Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers Festival twitter accounts.
From there, Google Analytics charts the number of unique visitors to the relevant website and the average number of pages read, while Sleepers Publishing reports back on the number of copies sold.
(Note: In the above example of Things We Didn’t See Coming, international access restrictions for the free promotion would need to be enforced pending the release of foreign editions from February 2010 onwards.)
Again, this is just an idea, where the titles, publishers and aggregators are interchangeable. Prominent award winning titles such as The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and Breath by Tim Winton are other possible alternatives, although their earlier release dates may render the profits of such a venture less viable.
Personally, I would be very keen to see such an experiment undertaken, if only to chart the viability of eBooks as a promotional tool in the Australian market. What do other readers think?
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Comments
Susan Hawthorne — 11 October at 04:07PM
When we began our eBook publishing project back in October 2006, we noticed exactly the same thing - I have talked about this endlessly - about how free access increases sales. We do not have permission from authors to give away all content in a book - however, even giving away 20 pages has a similar - if reduced effect. Our web sales went up considerably after we launched our eBooks. To see our eBooks, go to http://www.spinifexpress.com.au and click on the eBookstore. We are revamping our site at present, so you may see changes in coming weeks.
Elena — 05 November at 09:27AM
I am really keen to see the results of this experiment. From what I've heard around various water coolers, Australians are either too reluctant to embrace the eBook, or we're just a little behind, technically, than other parts of the world. Making them freely available would be a step towards assessing and starting to fill the need, if there is one, for ebooks.